Stage:

...Mervin Oglethorpe who has risked his position by inviting the Sanders family to perform, constantly assuring the congregation that he is not bringing music to the regular service...

...It is just another feel-good revue, a cheerful way to pass an evening while we wait for art and commitment and passion to light up the new season-if ever...

...But the playgoers ended by embracing the characters and responding positively to the vigor-if not the lyrics-of the songs...

...On this musical skeleton hangs the story of the individual members of the Sanders family whose testifying-as testifying should be-is autobiographical: Burl and Vera, who are trying to make a go of a filling station without selling beer in the attached store and who manage to sprinkle the evening with advertisements...

...My first reaction to Smoke was mild annoyance, a suspicion that we were going to be asked to condescend to these people...

...A funny, acid, knockabout farce-satire centering on the Second Coming, it seemed to baffle viewers who had trouble with so sophisticated a play performed in the dialect of rural Georgia...

...When the Southern Theater Conspiracy's production of Tent Meeting turned up off-Broadway in 1987, after having played all over the country, it received indifferent reviews and lasted for only fifteen performances...

...Smoke, which began at the McCarter in Princeton in 1988, most resembles Oil City Symphony, a casual seeming revue that ran off-Broadway for more than a year (1987-89...

...My chief complaint about that number is that the chorus is repeated over and over (does the management not trust the folks in the congregation...

...the sweet potato pie I had was not quite moist enough but it was blessedly (as we say at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church) light on the sugar, which in excess ruins so many attempts at this delicacy...

...which buoy the spirited chorus...

...On the other hand, Smoke on the Mountain, "a new gospel comedy musical," an amiable show where Tent Meeting was sometimes abrasive, has settled into the Lamb's Theatre for what promises to be a comfortable run...

...It was not the humor in the songs and their presentation that bothered me, for there has always been a subversive undertone in Protestant churches, particularly among the young, that contradicts the rigidity which proclamations out of Tupelo, Mississippi, have led us to expect...

...It kidded the performers, the music, the occasion, and ended by sucking the audience in, making them part of the event and turning the joke into a celebratory occasion...

...It was not irreverence...

...Written by the performers, Oil City pretended to be a concert by a group which had played together in high school and had come back for a reunion performance years later...

...and Uncle Stanley, newly returned from a long backslide into booze and jail...

...There is a moment of crisis when Denise and June move in patterned steps to one of the songs and the more conservative members of the congregation stomp out convinced that the preacher has brought not only music but dancing into their church...

...Smoke on the Mountain is the same kind of show, although the shrug should perhaps not be "what-the-hell" since the occasion is an evening of gospel music, performed by a family of part-time revivalists in a Baptist church (hard-shell, I assume) in North Carolina...

...It was a feel-good show which never lost its comic edge but persuaded its audience to a what-the-hell shrug that indicated a willingness to look foolish, as in the auditorium-wide dancing of the "Hokey-Pokey...

...It is also the story of the Rev...

...Smoke is not likely to bring anyone to Jesus nor even to make the audience think-as Tent Meeting might-but then it was clearly not intended as a conversion drama or a laughing theological game...

...Oglethorpe time to gloss over the difficulties while the rest of us go out for coffee and pie (a great improvement on the Oil City cookies...

...The audience, prepared to laugh at the foibles of the family and at songs like "I'm Using My Bible for a Roadmap," were quickly willing to cross the we-they bridge and join in the singing of "Bringing in the Sheaves...

...I remember a youth meeting in our church basement fifty years ago at which our preacher tapdanced to a jazzed-up version of "Count Your Many Blessings...

...it was fun...

...Only the intermission saves the day, for it gives Rev...

...The portraits are broad caricatures and the songs are often ludicrous-particularly if you think Stabat Mater is the only way religious music can go...

...That kind of fun finally prevails in Smoke on the Mountain...

...Conceived by Alan Bailey, who directed, and written by Connie Ray, who played June, the nonsinging Sanders (she did play a mean set of bones on one number), Smoke is essentially a gospel revue, mixing a few standard hymns with songs which indicate that this is country-music territory-not the current country music of maudlin broken-heart love songs, but an earlier, anecdotal mode, heavy on metaphor and moral...

...June, who is something of an outsider...

...GERALD wealesD weales...

...and we never got a chance to sing the verses ("Sowing the morning, Sowing seeds of gladness...

...the twins, shy Dennis and Denise, who have show-business longings...